Zotac has introduced a number of new ZBOX mini-PC at CES 2015 and we’ll take a quick look at the most interesting SKUs so far.

The ZBOX EN860 is an all-black gaming rig, packed in Zotac’s oldest ZBOX form factor with a 19x19cm footprint. It’s an upgrade of the EN760, which launched six months ago. However, there is no word on the spec (the “old” EN760 sports a Core i5-4200U and GTX 860M graphics). The new SKU features the same GPU, with G-Sync and 4K 60Hz support, but other than that we don’t have any info.

However, the company also released two new Pico models and the specs are out, thanks to Liliputing. The ZBOX Pico PI330 is based on an Intel Atom Z3375 quad-core (Bay Trail) processor and features 4GB of LPDDR3-1066 memory. It comes with 64GB of eMMC storage, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth.

The ZBOX Pico PA330 comes with somewhat more interesting silicon, in the form of AMD’s A4-6400T SoC with AMD R3 graphics. This is a Mullins part and to the best of our knowledge it is the first ZBOX based on Mullins (Zotac has a number of Kabini SKUs though).

However, the rest of the spec does not keep up with the Intel SKU, as the PA330 comes with 2GB of DDRL-1333 memory and a paltry 32GB of eMMC storage. On the upside, it does have somewhat better connectivity, with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0.

Both models come with three USB ports, HDMI and mini DisplayPort video output, audio connector, miniSD/SDHC/SDXC card reader and a VESA mount. The dimensions are truly pocketable – just 115x55x19mm – roughly the size of a chubby 2.5-inch external drive.

There is still no word on the pricing, but first-gen Pico models were relatively affordable, considering they shipped with Windows 8.1 Bing Edition.

One of the first portable computers sporting an AMD “Mullins” chip has hit the shops. The maker of expensive printer ink HP has released its HP Pavilion 10z is a small “laptop” with a touchscreen display and an AMD E1 Micro-6200T processor. We say laptop but it seems more like a netbook with a slightly better display to us. It’s available from HP for $250.

Mullins chips are low-power, dual-core processors for low-cost tablets, notebooks, and 2-in-1 systems and they fill a similar role to Intel’s Atom. AMD says you’ll get better graphics performance from Mullins. The AMD E1 Micro-6200T is a 1.4 GHz dual-core processor with 300 MHz AMD Radeon R2 graphics. The chip has a 3.95W TDP. What is particularly daft about this as a test of Mullins ability is that HP gave the 10z a small 24Whr battery which can only manage four hours of life.

It also has 2GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, HDMI and Ethernet, a headset jack, stereo speakers, and an SD card reader. The system has a 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display. It measures 10.7? x 7.6? x 0.9? and weighs about 2.5 pounds. (For readers whose countries were not colonised by the British Empire, that's 27cm x 19.5cm x 23mm and 1.2kg. Ed)

AMD is serious about getting into tablets and thin and light notebooks. The launch of Beema and Mullins APUs is just an example that things are getting better and we expect to see some Beema designs at Computex 2014, in the first week of June.

Beema replaces Kabini and it comes with four Puma plus cores, next generation Radeon graphics and supports HSA. The decision to include HSA support is a big deal, as getting a compute component in this market has potential. Inexpensive tablets and notebooks with additional parallel capabilities could be a sales booster for AMD.

Building on low-end APU success

AMD has been doing well in this market for the past couple of years and we hope Beema will be yet another successful product. AMD has some key players on its side, such as HP, Lenovo and Dell. These companies traditionally had a lot of AMD design wins in the entry level market.

Beema’s replacement comes in 2015 and the chip, codenamed Nolan, is the company’s first 20nm APU. The chip has a new core based and it will use the new 20nm manufacturing process. It will use the same socket as Beema and relies on FT3 BGA packaging and socket. We expect that connected standby gets even better with Nolan and Beema is the first AMD platform to bring this nice feature to the tablet and essential market.

Going down to 20nm from 28nm you can expect that the chip will be able to give you more performance with less power, idle power will go down, battery life will increase. First we need to see what can AMD do with Beema as the A6 6310, A4 6210 and E2 6110 could do well in 15W TDP mainstream notebooks, while the E1 6010 dual-core clocked at 1.35GHz will fit nicely in some sub-10W TDP notebooks, or hybrids. However, it's not just the transition to 20nm. AMD made some impressive tweaks to Beema and Mullins, significantly cutting power consumption on the 28nm node. These lessons will be applied to 20nm products.

Competitive tablet parts but...

AMD has three more tablet chips. A10 Micro 6700T and A4 Micro 6400T are both quad-cores clocked at 1.2GHz and 1.0GHz respectively and have 2MB cache, Radeon R6 and R3 graphics and both have a 4.5W TDP. AMD claims that they operate under 2.8 W SPD (standard design power) and that this should be an average consumption for most of the tasks. A10 Micro 6700T maximum turbo frequency goes as high as 2.2 GHz while A4 Micro 6400T stops at 1.6GHz. The last of the tablet chips is dual core E1 Micro 6200T clocked at 1GHz with max turbo clock of 1.4GHz, 1MB cache, Radeon R2 graphics clocked at 300W. The chip has a 3.95W TDP and the same 2.8W SDP as its more powerful siblings.

It remains to be seen if the gaming tablet strategy will work out well, but reference tablet we saw on Mobile World Congress 2014 looks quite promising. With Beema AMD can offer Intel’s Bay Trail customers a healthy alternative probably at the same price if not a bit more affordable. With 20nm Nolan, if all goes well, things might look even better. However, Intel's contra-revenue programme has tilted the table and AMD simply cannot afford to burn money on subisidies.

AMD has not had much luck in tablets, that’s no secret and Intel hasn’t exactly done a great job, either. For years mass-market tablets were powered solely by ARM-based chips, but last year Intel upped the ante with Bay Trail-T, arguably the first truly competitive x86 SoC in the tablet space.

This year it’s AMD’s turn. Mullins offers a big improvement over Temash, it delivers a lot more performance and a few new features that make it a lot more attractive than its predecessor. Performance is not an issue, either.

However, having a good product simply isn’t enough.

Why Mullins could succeed where other APUs have failed

Mullins offers vastly superior efficiency compared to Temash. AMD started using the SDP metric last year, in response to Intel’s decision to use SDP for some of its mobile/tablet parts. However, AMD still uses TDP, too.

Mullins parts feature an SDP of 2.8W. AMD previously stated that Mullins would end up with an SDP of ~2W, roughly on a par with Bay Trail-T parts. The actual TDP is of course somewhat higher. Temash parts feature an SDP of 3W to 4W, but the TDP is about 8W. Mullins offers a huge improvement, with an SDP of 2.8W and TDP ranging from 3.95W to 4.5W. Thanks to STAMP and other efficiency tweaks, Mullins can deliver quite a bit more performance than Temash in the same thermal envelope, and then some.

For example, the Temash based A6-1450 packs four Jaguar CPU cores clocked at 1GHz and it can hit 1.4GHz on Turbo. The GPU is clocked at 300MHz, but it clock up to 400MHz on Turbo. However, the Mullins-based A10 Micro-6700T can hit a max CPU clock speed of 2.2GHz, while the GPU can reach 500MHz. This is not only much higher than what Temash was capable of, it is also higher than what we saw on mainstream Kabini APUs with a TDP of 15W, yet the A10 Micro-6700T is a 4.5W part.

'Contra revenue' is Intel’s biggest competitive advantage

AMD has been showing off its Discovery tablet platform for a while, but so far AMD-based tablets have been scarcer than hen’s teeth. Now that AMD finally has a truly competitive part that can take on Bay Trail-T, it would be logical to expect more design wins.

However, thanks to Intel’s ‘contra revenue’ scheme this won’t be easy. Intel insists it’s not doing anything wrong and it doesn’t like it when someone describes its tablet push as a massive subsidy programme. Ultimately, that’s what it really is. Just because Mullins could succeed doesn't mean it actually will.

AMD is not thrilled by the prospect of more Intel subsidies and market development programmes. The company has been dealing with similar Intel shenanigans for almost two decades and it knows it cannot compete on a level playing field. AMD cannot afford to burn hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter to gain a few dozen tablet design wins. Therefore AMD is targeting a somewhat different market, mid-range $299 tablets. Intel is trying to grab everything from $99 to $299 with its tablet SoCs, while Haswell and Broadwell should take care of the higher end of the market.

Intel hopes to ship 40 million tablet parts this year. We don’t know what AMD has in mind, but it is probably not even close to 40 million. It will be tricky, but this time around AMD appears to have a truly competitive product. In addition, not even Intel can afford to keep spending $1bn per year on its tablet push, so we should see its contra revenue taper off moving forward.

Even so, it might give Intel a huge competitive advantage. Intel is on track to quadruple its tablet shipments this year. If it manages to double them next year it will end up with 80+ million units, which seems like a relatively conservative estimate at this point. Intel is stealing design wins from the likes of Mediatek, Rockchip, Nvidia and so on. AMD will have to steal them back from Intel, which sounds a bit more difficult, even with competitive products.

The company claims a 2X advantage in compute performance-per-watt compared to competing processors. The new chips offer a 50% improvement in clock speeds at nearly half of the TDP of the previous generation (Kabini). GPU performance-per-watt has been practically doubled compared to Temash parts.

AMD’s biggest selling point is efficiency, so let’s start there, right after we take a look at the branding of the new parts.

AMD’s new branding for Beema and Mullins

AMD has three new low-power Mullins parts and it also has new branding for the tweaked cores. Mullins parts can be distinguished from Beema products quite easily, as they sport a Micro prefix in their designation.

The E1 Micro-6200T is a dual-core clocked up to 1.4GHz with a 3.95W TDP (2.8W SDP). It features Radeon R2 graphics, i.e. 128 GCN cores clocked at 300MHz and it can handle DDR3L-1066 memory. The A4 Micro-6400T is a quad-core clocked at 1.6GHz. It has a TDP of 4.5W (2.8W SDP) and Radeon R3 graphics clocked at 350MHz. The quad A10 Micro-6700T is the fastest Mullins chip, with a CPU clock of 2.2GHz and Radeon R6 graphics clocked 500MHz. Both A-series parts feature the same TDP/SDP, 2MB of L2 cache and support for DDR3L-1333 memory.

Beema starts off with four different SKUs, two A-series and two E-series products. The E1-6010 is the slowest of the bunch, with two CPU cores clocked at 1.35GHz, Radeon R2 graphics clocked at 350MHz and a 10W TDP. The E2-6110 is a 15W quad-core clocked at 1.5GHz, with Radeon R2 graphics clocked at up to 500MHz.

The A4-6210 and the A6-6310 are quad-core 15W parts. The A4-6210 is clocked at 1.8GHz and it sports R3 graphics clocked at 600MHz. The flagship A6-6310 is clocked at 2.4GHz, with R4 graphics clocked at up to 800MHz. It also supports DDR3L-1866 memory.

Compared with previous generation Kabini and Temash parts, the new APUs feature substantially lower TDPs across the range. Both CPU and GPU clocks have been bumped up. AMD did not add more CUs, so we’re still looking at 128 GCN cores, but the GPU clocks are quite a bit higher.

Optimised power, reduced leakage

The basic approach is the same, so what did AMD do to boost efficiency and clocks? The company claims a 19% leakage reduction in the CPU department and a 38% reduction in the GPU. In addition, AMD tweaked thermal monitoring by taking more temperature readings on both the core and the package. This allowed designers to unlock higher frequencies, especially in boost mode, i.e. when opening websites, starting applications and so on.

Low-voltage parts aren’t meant for demanding applications, so the standard usage scenario does not involve more than a few minutes under full load. As a result AMD can afford to bump up clocks without negatively effecting the overall TDP, as the chips usually don’t run at the top clock long enough to make much of a difference. AMD calls its new trick Skin Temperature Aware Power Management (STAMP). The company claims STAMP can also extend battery life by completing tasks in less time, thus compensating for the extra energy expended at higher clocks.

AMD also tweaked its boost algorithms and power management. Thanks to reduced leakage, STAMP and other optimizations, Beema is about 20 percent more efficient than Kabini, so it allows AMD to squeeze more performance into the same thermal envelope.

Bold performance claims

AMD says the new parts offer a 10% GPU boost compared to the previous generation, with a twofold improvement in GPU performance-per-watt. AMD picked a few APU-loving benchmarks to compare Beema to Haswell and Bay Trail-M parts. The new APUs can beat the Pentium 3556U (Haswell) and the Pentium N3510 (Bay Trail) in PCMark 8, Basemark CL, 3DMark11. In the same test Mullins parts beat Bay Trail-T.

Naturally these benchmarks were chosen by AMD to prove a point, as they tend to like chips with snappier graphics and better OpenCL capabilities. In CPU-bound tests, the results should be quite different. While they don’t paint the full picture, the benchmarks are impressive, especially when you consider the prices of Haswell Y and Haswell U parts. Furthermore, Intel needs two architectures to cover this market segment (Haswell and Bay Trail), while AMD relies on just one, with superior pricing.

Beema/Mullins is AMD’s first APU with a Platform Security Processor (PSP). This is basically an on-die Cortex A5 processor with dedicated ROM and SRAM. It also features a cryptographic co-processor capable of handling RSA, SHA, ECC, AES and a few other crypto standards. While PSP may not be a big deal for home users, it should come in handy for embedded applications. We will take a closer look at AMD’s PSP and a few other Beema features later.

Overall AMD appears to have done a rather good job. Beema was never meant to be a huge update, it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but the efficiency gains are very impressive indeed. Kabini and Temash were good performers, but Bay Trail parts offered a lot more efficiency making them a better fit for many form factors (namely tablets and hybrids). Their biggest competitive disadvantage had nothing to do with performance, it was all about efficiency. With Beema and Mullins AMD has closed the gap, almost.

AMD is playing around with the #AMDReveal hashtag and showing around teasers of what appears to be a SoC under a magnifying glass. No, we are not entirely sure what the ‘reveal’ is all about, but it’s almost certainly a SoC.

It looks a lot like a Kabini die and it is almost certainly a SoC. However, this does not mean AMD is teasing just another Kabini/Temash SKU. Chances are the company is teasing Beema, its next generation notebook SoC. Beema is already shipping to customers and the first products are expected in a couple of months, probably in time for Computex.

Beema and Mullins are all about lower TDPs

AMD has high hopes for Beema and Mullins SoCs, which are set to replace Kabini and Temash products this year. However, Kabini will probably stick around for a while, especially in the new AM1 platform.

We still don’t have any exact specs for Beema and Mullins for the time being. AMD has been dropping hints for a while, so we know a few figures. Beema is coming first and it will be available in 10W to 25W versions, so it should consume about 5W less than Kabini parts. Intel’s Bay Trail parts are quite a bit more efficient than Kabini/Temash, but AMD’s new generation should close the gap, at least in some segments.

Mullins will have a 2W SDP. AMD started using the unpopular SDP metric on some of its parts, namely on chips that go head to head with Intel SoCs that use the same metric. Mullins might even end up on a par with Bay Trail-T parts.

Up to 250% faster graphics, but...

AMD expects the new parts to end up significantly faster than Bay Trail in the GPU department. The company says its new SoCs are about “250% better than comparable Bay Trail products.”

We’ve come to expect superior iGPU performance from AMD APUs, hence we aren’t surprised by the claim. Kabini and Temash parts feature 128 GCN cores clocked between 225MHz and 600MHz. AMD’s old Brazos parts featured 80 VLIW5 cores, so we are expecting to see either an increase in the core count or a substantial clock bump this time around.

CPU performance is the big question. Beema will employ new Puma cores, or Puma+ depending on who you ask. Not much is known about Puma, but it looks like a tweaked Jaguar core. Jaguar is tiny, just 3.1 mm2 per core. We doin’t know the size of AMD’s new Puma cores yet, but if AMD managed to optimize the design and save a bit of space, it could all go towards adding more GCN cores, which would explain the 250% claim.

Jaguar offered a 15% IPC improvement over Bobcat, but it was an entirely new architecture. We don’t expect Puma/Puma+ to offer the same IPC gain over Jaguar, but AMD has surprised us before. AMD’s emphasis appears to be on reducing power consumption and boosting GPU performance, either by adding GCN cores or by bumping up clocks. Many Jaguar products can hold their own against comparable Bay Trail parts in terms of CPU performance, but they need quite a bit more power. This is especially true of Temash, as every milliwatt makes a big difference in tablet parts, making Bay Trail-T parts a lot more competitive. By reducing power consumption AMD should unlock more performance, especially in Mullins parts.

In other words, even though we don’t expect to see huge IPC gains, the overall performance should be significantly better, considering the tablet thermal envelope. We should know more in 3 days, 22 hours, 43 minutes and 17 seconds.

The market responded to AMD’s latest earnings figures and turnaround plan quite positively, bolstered by the fact that AMD was close to profitability in traditionally slow quarter. AMD did a few things right and the industry recognizes that it has a future.

During the chipmaker’s Q1 2014 conference call, AMD was asked by Christopher Rolland, FBR Capital Markets, about the company’s plans for the next manufacturing node following Kaveri and AMD’s SVP Lisa Su had something to say about it.

Lisa mentioned that all AMD products in 2014 will be 28nm, both graphics and AMD’s semi-custom APU business. This sort of dashes the hopes of many Radeon fans who were hoping for a 20nm graphics upgrade before the end of the year.

20nm still in design phase

Lisa confirmed that AMD is working on 20nm designs, but she did not reveal too many details.

“We (AMD) are, you know, actively in the design phase for 20-nanometer and that will come to production. And then clearly we'll go to FinFET. So that would be the progression of it,“ Su said.

With this in mind 20nm products can be expected in 2015 and 16nm FinFET manufacturing will be available from Samsung and GlobalFoundries later. AMD is definitely moving to FinFET after 20nm parts, as expected.

In case something radically doesn’t change, we can expect 16nm AMD parts in 2016, not earlier than that.

Upbeat on Beema

Lisa is happy that low-voltage Beema APUs are already shipping to customers as of Q1 2014 and we will have a chance to see the designs in Q2 2014 and onwards. Lisa was very positive on Beema and she expects many design wins for this part. We would expect to see some of these parts showing or shipping by late Q2 2014, roughly in time for Computex time. If you want a bit more precise date, we expect to see new Beema and Kaveri designs in mobile space by early June 2014.

Lisa Su went on record clearly stating that Mullins and Beema have plenty of design wins.

“And so for Mullins and Beema, I mean I think we have a strong sort of design wins for those products. We expect those to launch in Q2 and build through the second half of the year” which gives you an idea what AMD has planned for the second part of 2014.”

AMD has showed us its reference tablet based on the 28nm Mullins chip. It works at 1.2GHz and it is a quad-core part. AMD told us that they never had issues with 64-bit support on tablet chips. We saw it running Windows 64-bit and the overall performance was quite good.

The tablet in question had 2GB DDR3, Low Power 2014 APU i.e. Mullins, 60 GB mSATA SSD, 1920x1080 display and as mentioned Windows 8.1 64-bit. Quanta made the reference design tablet. It supports USB 3.0 as well as mini Display port all via Lighting Bolt. We could learn from AMD that the reference design is wrapped the 10-inch form factor and we don't expect smaller devices. The chip itself is at a tablet acceptable 4.5W TDP.

We don’t know the actual battery life since this is still a reference design tablet, but some retail tablets should be out by the middle of the year, AMD told us. MSI's W30 with an AMD A4 1200 processor is already out, and there's a Xolo tablet - these are the first vendors to launch a 28nm AMD APU in a tablet. This year should be better and there should be a few more designs based on these quad cores.

These tablets offer a decent amount performance and as long as the battery can last enough and they will compete well against Atom chips including freshly launched dual Atom Z3460, Z3480 Merrifield based dual cores and Atom Z3560 dual and Z3580 Moorefield quad core, all based on Airmont 22nm core.

AMD also showed its ULV mini PC and some gaming controllers but we will talk about this in another piece, since they aren't exactly new.

AMD is on a bit of a roll. The company introduced Jaguar last year, won a couple of huge design wins for custom APUs, then it rolled out Hawaii and Mantle and earlier this month it finally launched Kaveri. A few days ago we saw the first Warsaw server parts, too.

As far as the consumer space goes, the next few months should see more flavours of desktop Kaveri, along with mobile parts. New Jaguar parts are coming as well. However, the really new stuff comes a bit later.

Mullins and Beema are AMD's upcoming low-voltage APUs and they should replace Temash and Kabini SKUs. Based on new Puma x86 cores, the chips will come in dual-core and quad-core versions. Beema will have a 2W SDP, roughly on part with Bay Trail-T, while Mullins will be available in 10W to 25W versions (TDP). This is about 5W less than Kabini.

"We’re talking about 250% better than the comparable Bay Trail products. What is different is on the compute performance, where we had traditionally been not as strong, we see significant performance improvements,” she said.

However, AMD has not released any CPU performance figures, but at least the GPU looks promising. Beema and Mullins should launch sometime in the first half of the year, but we still don't have a precise date.

AMD might have a bit of trouble due to the basic nature of its contract with Globalfoundries. AMD and Globalfoundries have a “take or pay” arrangement, which requires AMD to buy a flat amount of wafers from its spinoff.

This year AMD needs to buy $1.15 billion worth of wafers, reports Barrons. The trouble is that AMD hasn’t been buying enough. In the first three quarters of the year AMD bought $746 million worth of wavers and the numbers are going down. It bought $269 million in Q1 and just $222 million in Q3. Even if AMD gets $250 million this quarter, it will still end up $150 million short, or it could order heaps of 32nm chips and sell them at a discount. One way or another AMD is bound to take a hit.

Since GloFo doesn’t produce AMD GPUs, the launch of Volcanic Islands products won’t make any difference. What about console custom APUs? Tough luck, the chips inside the PS4 and Xbox One are built by TSMC, too. In theory, it’s possible that GloFo will start making console chips at a later date, but not this year and probably not next year, either.

AMD’s x86 market share is going up, but that’s only thanks to console parts. Sales of its PC chips are actually going down – and that’s what matter for the GloFo deal. What’s more, AMD ditched its plans to build the first 28nm GloFo APUs last year, Kabini and Temash are built at TSMC.

So what about Kaveri, Beema and Mullins? It is still unclear, the rumour mill points to TSMC being tapped for Kaveri (bulk, not SOI), but we are still not sure about Puma-based low-end APUs. Basically there is a very good chance that all AMD 28nm parts next year will be produced by TSMC.